Connect
To Top

Meet Eric Diaz of OYE Business Intelligence in Central Phoenix

Avatar photo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Eric Diaz.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Absolutely. I grew up in the eighties and nineties in Columbus, Ohio. I had an entrepreneurial spirit growing up and was the kid that always had baseball card sales as well as lemonade stands, etc. I really enjoyed this, but knew in my elder teen years that I had to focus on a trade. I decided to go to come Columbus State Community College and achieved an Associate’s Degree in 2001. That made me proud as it was the first time that I had achieved something to this level without really being required to do it, but because I wanted to do it. From Columbus State, I transferred to Ohio State and I spent the next 3 years studying marketing and supply chain.

I really enjoyed marketing the most, but my advisers showed me that significantly more jobs were available in logistics and supply chain. They were wise in that and told me that I’d have a much better chance of getting a job if I focused on applying for those supply chain jobs. I did just this and had three job offers lined up when I graduated from Ohio State. I took the one that was most interesting to me, which was Staples and began a 2-year rotational program that would take me to three different states across the country. This was very exciting to me, I loved the opportunity and still have passion for the company (Staples) for giving me this opportunity. After completing the 2-year rotational program, I decided to go back to get my Masters in Boston. I missed school and I wanted to get back into it and learn again. But also I loved my job with Staples and wanted to be loyal to them. I asked my team if I was able to pursue an internship with Staples as I went back to school and they said ‘yes’. I wound up doing a 12-month co-op working program with staples and taking a year off of school (in coordination with my academic advisers) to work and live in Shanghai. That was amazing and really opened my eyes to the possibilities that the business world, let alone the world in general, offered. I came back from that experience happy in 2008, but knew I wanted to get back to my entrepreneurial roots.

In 2008, having recently graduated from Northeastern University in Boston, I decided to launch my own consulting company. With my grad school friend we launched this company which had a focus to help small businesses with their needs in marketing, finance, and logistics. It was just my partner and I, but we felt we were strong enough to provide value in all three of these immense areas. As can be guessed, it did not work out very well. It was hard to get clients, and the only people that would return our calls seemed to be the ones that wanted to buy marketing, and more specific web design. The only thing potential clients wanted was something that would help them sell more. It made sense, but we did not know that before going out and meeting these potential customers. So we learned from that, and we knocked out the other two facets of our business and focused on only marketing and web design. From there we trudged along rather unsuccessfully until my partner had run out of savings and I bought him out to own the company outright. It was an amiable parting and we still remain friends to this day.

However, now I had to figure out how to make this business work and decided that the real opportunity may be in social media. A friend of mine I had went to grad school with had started his own marketing and advertising company called me. He had a prospect, a Barcelona radio station that had need for building a social media presence in Spanish. Even though I had no idea how to do that, I told the potential client that I would be all over it. By this time I had found my new business partner, Natasha Pongonis, and we went all out for this project. We met and pitched for this project for two straight months and at the end we did not get it. It made sense, we didn’t have the experience and the client went with a more seasoned company. However, it showed Natasha and I that there was a real opportunity here and within a few months we pitched enough and finally landed our first clients in social media.

Following this, Natasha soon came on full time after we were able to compensate her effectively and had steady work. We went on to rebrand our company as Social Media Spanish, as social media was the trend of the time and our niche was on the Hispanic market. This was around 2011 and the SEO generated by our new website helped us to gain a number of national clients including Castrol Motor Oil, Dial Soap, and the federal government agency CDC (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention).

Also in 2011, I decided to move to Phoenix, Arizona as being in this market would allow us to have a lot more credibility as far as being a legitimate Hispanic agency. Being in a 4% Hispanic market such as Ohio doesn’t give the same confidence as being located in a 40% market such as Phoenix does. I bought an office building on 15th Avenue, south of Indian school and we have been here ever since.

In 2015 Natasha and I launched a business intelligence platform to complement our services business. We realized that the social listening technology that was readily available from the larger social media platforms was not well tuned for the Hispanic consumer. We decided to build our own, and started this off with Excel spreadsheets on the way to realizing a better way through creating a software platform. Today, OYE is at the heart of everything we do as it differentiates us from all other Hispanic service agencies as we use its multicultural insights to influence strategy for our clients’ campaigns.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I would say that one of the struggles was launching the company in 2008 and not knowing what customers would actually buy. We had to learn the hard way that customers wouldn’t buy our service just because they may need it. They have a limited budget and we needed to think harder about what would actually help them succeed and that was to help them drive sales. That was one of the first things we struggled with.

One of the other things that we’ve struggled with along the way is the decision of whether or not to take funding from a venture capital firm to further build out OYE Business Intelligence. So far we have decided not to take funding and self-finance and it has worked to our benefit so far. But every year we re-evaluate to see if we should be indeed taking funds.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about OYE Business Intelligence – what should we know?
My company, OYE Business Intelligence is a software platform that provides business insights to Fortune 500 companies, federal government organizations, and large public universities. This platform helps those organizations provide better marketing contact and make better communications decisions with the largest, fastest-growing ethnic populations in the US. OYE! may have started as just an idea, but it now serves MassMutual, Schwarzkopf, got2b, Kroger, White Castle, and other nationally known brands.

My business partner, Natasha Pongonis, and I came up with the idea because we’d run a multicultural marketing agency since 2008. As part of our work for our agency, we were often asked to provide social intelligence using existing software platforms such as Radian6 from Salesforce and Crimson Hexagon. We always found these tools to be inadequate for truly understanding what todays US Hispanic market is talking about is. Basically, these tools only listen to what Spanish-speaking Hispanics discuss online, ignorant to the fact that as little as 20 percent of online Hispanics speak that language depending on the industry. If you really want to connect with a Hispanic audience, you are missing the story if you don’t listen to the English as well. OYE was born to fill this gap.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
An important characteristic is the ability to easily shrug off a loss and move on to something else. We call that ‘pivoting’ and we have found it very necessary through our existence. I preach to our small team that what we do today is not likely what we will be doing two years from now. This has served us well in allowing us to grow and survive for 10 years.

Contact Info:

Getting in touch: VoyagePhoenix is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

Related Items

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in